High social media use may be indicative of poor mental health in teens

Among adolescents, high degrees of social media use seem to correlate with poor mental health, a recent Sweden study suggests. However, there appears to be no longitudinal association between the two.

Drawing from a school-based longitudinal cohort including 101 schools across Sweden, the researchers looked at 3,501 adolescents (aged 14–15 years, 51.5 percent girls) who were followed for two consecutive years. Social media use was self-reported for weekdays and weekends, and mental health was assessed using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ).

On a between-person level, there was a moderate and positive correlation between social media use and SDQ scores. This suggests that on a group level, teenagers who used social media more tended to score higher on the overall SDQ, and in its externalizing and internalizing subdomains. Higher scores on the SDQ signify worse mental health.

In within-person analysis, the link between social media use and mental health issues was tenuous. Each 1-hour increase in social media use correlated with only a 0.02-point higher SDQ score after 1 year. Score increments were slightly larger for externalizing than internalizing problems.

“We found between-person rather than within-person positive associations between time spent on social media and symptoms of mental ill health, where adolescents with more hours of daily social media use also reported higher SDQ scores compared to their peers,” the researchers said.

“This suggests that social media use may serve as an indicator rather than a determinant of risk of mental health problems among adolescents,” they added. “The observed concurrent relationship between social media use and externalizing problems may warrant studies with different time frames and alternative measures of social media use to elucidate the nature of this association.”